Pros

Cons

Relatively low random read and write performance.

Bottom Line

With heatsink and non-heatsink versions, and a software setting that delivers maximum power at all times, the high-performance WD Black SN750 internal SSD will appeal to gamers and other PC enthusiasts seeking a PCI Express NVMe boot drive.

Jan. 18, 2019

Editor's update: The original review is based on Tom Brant's from PCMag US who had the 1 TB version of the SSD, we received the 500GB variant that's come out to market here, the specs and price have been updated.

One of a growing number of relatively inexpensive yet high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs), the WD Black SN750 NVMe ($249 for the 1TB model that the PCMag US team tested and 129.99 for the 500 GB which we had. ) is an excellent choice for installing in a new or upgraded PC on which you'll play games, edit multimedia, or do other, similar activities that involve reading and writing large amounts of data to a storage drive. This gumstick-shaped drive requires an available M.2 slot on your PC's motherboard supporting the PCI Express bus, which essentially limits it to motherboards from the past few years. It's very speedy, since it uses the PCI Express bus and the NVMe transfer protocol, but it's not as expensive as similar drives from even a year ago, thanks in part to a new memory-cell design and the steady decline in late 2018 in memory prices. Overall, it's an excellent M.2 SSD, though it's also far from unique in an increasingly crowded market.

Now, NVMe Means..."Not Very Money"?

Western Digital's "Black" moniker signifies high-performance storage. The company's existing WD Black NVMe SSD is designed to prioritize fast read and write speeds for people who can afford to spend around 40 cents per gigabyte on their main storage drive. The 40-cent mark is significant because it is generally the upper limit for what PCMag considers reasonable to spend on solid-state storage. But what if you could spend less—a lot less—and still get a drive that's nearly as fast?

That's the question that WD set out to answer with the new WD Black SN750 NVMe, and it came up with a great response. This drive offers several advantages over the original WD Black NVMe, in addition to a few drawbacks, but the most important difference is price. The suggested retail price for the previous-generation 1TB WD Black NVMe we tested is $399, while an SN750 in the same capacity rings up at just $249.

The result is a per-gigabyte price of just 25 cents, which until recently was something you could only expect from budget SSDs that rely on the older SATA interface and achieve far lower speeds than PCIe NVMe drives do. WD managed to decrease prices with a minimal effect on theoretical performance by using a common technique that other storage companies, such as Samsung, have also been exploring: packing more memory layers into the same physical space.

In the WD SN750's case, the memory NAND modules employ a 64-layer design. That's twice the storage density of WD's previous generation, which means not only less-expensive drives on a per-gigabyte basis, but also more capacity options. In addition to the 1TB version I tested, the SN750 also comes in 250GB ($79.99), 500GB ($129.99), and 2TB ($499.99) versions. (The last, largest capacity should ship sometime in February.) All of these have roughly the same 25-cent-per-gigabyte cost at their list prices, except for the 250GB model, which works out to 32 cents per gigabyte. This is a common trend among lower-capacity drives, since some of the costs of a drive are fixed no matter the drive's capacity.

Focused on Gaming

Though the SN750's price-per-gig is appealing, it's still no match for that of a resolutely value-minded SATA SSD such as the Samsung SSD 860 QVO, which will set you back just 15 cents per gigabyte. Another feather in SATA's cap is that most casual PC users, under most kinds of everyday drive operations, won't notice the difference between SATA speeds, which top out around 600MBps, and PCIe NVMe ones, which often range above 3,000MBps. The great difference in numbers notwithstanding, as speeds increase there's diminishing marginal impact on ordinary tasks such as web browsing and word processing.

So Western Digital is marketing the SN750 at gamers, who typically care a great deal about performance increases, even if they're marginal. As well they should: PC games are massive these days, and loading all the required files to start up a game or even to save at a checkpoint is a storage-intensive process that can noticeably improve with PCIe NVMe speeds. To sweeten the deal, Western Digital redesigned its SSD Toolbox Windows app with a slick new interface (pictured above) inspired by the look and feel of game menus.

The software's main substantive improvement is a new Gaming Mode. When this mode is activated, the SN750 is prevented from entering low-power mode, ensuring that it can deliver its peak throughput constantly.

With more power comes more heat generated, of course, so Western Digital will also sell a version of the SN750 with an aggressive-looking integrated heatsink. The heatsink, designed by well-known component firm EKWB (most familiar for its liquid-cooling waterblocks) and made of solid aluminum, will help prevent the drive from overheating when it's installed in a desktop motherboard that doesn't have its own thermal-management system for M.2 drives. (Some boards will have a small lid over one or more of the M.2 slots, equipped with a thermal pad, that acts like a heatsink.) Of course, laptop upgraders who have verified that they have an accessible PCIe NVMe-compatible slot would want to opt for the heatsink-less model, to avoid height-interference issues.

The SN750's five-year warranty matches that of other, similar drives, including the Samsung SSD 970 EVO. So does its rated endurance: Western Digital estimates that the 1TB version of the SN750 should last for 600TB of data written before cells begin to wear out, the same projection that Samsung puts on the SSD 970 EVO.

Performance to Match

The SN750's gaming features and inexpensive pricing present it with a tall order: Can it still deliver the performance that PC enthusiasts expect from NVMe drives? To find out, I compared its performance on PC Labs' benchmark tests with that of competing NVMe drives, including the Samsung SSD 970 EVO, our current Editors' Choice among premium PCI Express SSDs. Since our SSD testbed has a motherboard with a built-in thermal cover for M.2 SSDs, I tested the version of the SN750 without a heatsink and with Gaming Mode enabled. I also used a pre-release version of the SSD Toolbox software provided by WD.

The most basic test of a storage drive's performance is sequential read and write speeds, which represent the numbers that manufacturers use to advertise their drives. The SN750 achieved sequential reads of 3,284MBps and sequential writes of 3,129MBps on our Crystal Diskmark 6.0 sequential test. These are excellent results when compared with the previous-generation WD Black NVMe SSD, as well as the wildly expensive Intel Optane SSD 905P. The Samsung SSD 970 EVO showed slightly higher read speeds, but slightly lower write speeds.

Sequential read and write speeds don't necessarily indicate how well a drive will perform difficult requests such as loading large games, however. Our Crystal DiskMark random (4K) test, which reads and writes small blocks of data from random locations on the drive, is a better gauge of this. Here, the WD Black SN750 actually performed worse than both its predecessor and the Samsung SSD 970 EVO, and well behind the Optane SSD 905P.

While the Crystal DiskMark tests measure theoretical performance with test data sets, our AS-SSD file-transfer tests are a more graspable measure of how a drive can handle file types that you'd actually have on your home PC, such as game folders, other application/program folders, and single-file disk images (ISO files). On this test, the SN750 did exceptionally well on the game folder transfer test, beating all of its competitors with a score of 1,252MBps. It also offered class-leading performance on the program transfer test.

Like nearly all SSDs we've tested, the SN750 scored within a few points of 5,000 on the PCMark 8 storage test, which simulates an hour or so of real-world PC use, including opening and closing different types of apps. For reference, the Samsung SSD 860 QVO scored 4,881 on this test, a difference small enough that it's a good reminder that if you want an SSD to upgrade a budget PC, you can stick with a cheaper SATA drive and get most of the way there.

What Gamers Want

For many gamers upgrading or building a new PC, the SSD is somewhere below the graphics card, CPU, and possibly even the case and motherboard on the list of components on which to spare no expense. In the WD Black SN750 SSD, those gamers can find a very capable SSD that includes gaming-specific features like a heatsink and software power management, while still keeping the price to a manageable 25 cents per gigabyte. You'll forgo the absolute top random read and write performance that drives like the Samsung SSD 970 EVO offer, but you'll get nearly everything else you're looking for in a high-performance drive.

Bottom Line: With heatsink and non-heatsink versions, and a software setting that delivers maximum power at all times, the high-performance WD Black SN750 internal SSD will appeal to gamers and other PC enthusiasts seeking a PCI Express NVMe boot drive.

About the Author

Kevin Sebastian is a passionate writer who lives and breathes on the internet. He started out as a Reddit lurker and eventually made his way to editorial. His curiosity for the region's burgeoning tech scene lead him to editorial positions in various tech publications managing content in technology and gaming. While Kevin is not writing or ranting about the gaming or tech industry, you can find him in far off deserts trying to practice his astrophotography, or in the city making documentaries. See Full Bio